Category: Duane Michals

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.” ~ Duane Michals (source)

First day of the week… Grading today.I know I will be pressured by posting each day. Yes, my images are filtered but enjoying the ghostly feature. Composed of dots (atoms), seen but not realized. Whose to say… This is not the reality of that moment?

I can make no statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever. But this doesn’t explain the pictures. At best it explains what led to their being painted.” ~ Gerhard Richter

Blurring... Gerhard Richter

Back on the trail again, I walked Lake Harriet and continued to gather my photographs for my site. My studies are progressing. For the last few days, I have been reading Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler. It’s a very smart book. I appreciate how the authors divide the table of contents into categories, such as, how to influence, enhance, increase the appeal, and make better design decisions. It may not be apparent to the student of web or graphic design at first but this text makes it abundantly clear that the world of design is not fragmented into absolute niches. It flows and connects with all other areas in which design touches our lives.

As I work on this series of photos… I was moved to google blur. No I wasn’t looking for the group, even though I admire their work. I was looking for blur as in… My photos are blurred. Yes, I am doing it purposefully to allow me greater freedom interpreting the world around me. I ran into the work of Gerhard Richter and his words ring true for me, just as do the works of Daune Michels.

The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at… . We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong…” ~ Duane Michals (1932– )

Seeing... Is the Start... Feeling is the Next Step or Not.

I love reading Daune Michals’s words and viewing his works. I ran across his work as a grad student and he moves beyond seeing and each work evokes a feeling. He takes the viewer pass the mere obvious and causes the viewer to feel the work and carry it beyond the gallery’s wall or outside a book’s cover.

Ansel Adams or any great photographer has this gift to record what the eyes don’t see or record what we miss.